Читаем Winter Rain полностью

Antelope laughed without mirth. “I am the one with a woman, brother! I am the one with children. Don’t talk to me about the villages where the women and little ones are trapped by the yellow-legs!”

Indeed, rarely were the young warriors punished by the tai-bo soldiers. It was the Kwahadi families who were made to suffer—losing lodges and blankets and robes, clothing and meat and weapons when they fled quickly enough to escape the soldiers. Losing their lives, falling prey to the Tonkawa scouts and yellow-leg soldiers when they did not run faster than the white man’s bullets.

A person crippled by an empty belly, weakened because there was simply too little food for all to eat—he or she would stand little chance of outrunning the hissing bullets when the tai-bos came.

With a shudder Tall One ducked out of Old Owl Man’s lodge and stood feeling the sting of great cold. A terrible storm had rumbled down the very gut of the plains, rolling in on the hoary, marrow-numbing breath of Winter Man. In its wake on the prairie above, the storm left behind icy snowdrifts, and many children cried out with hungry bellies. Old ones as well wailed in want. As hungry as he might be, Tall One had vowed not to complain with the gnawing pain. The warriors must be brave, the men reminded themselves. It was up to them and them alone to find meat—and thereby exorcise the ghost of starvation from the Kwahadi.

Their last hunt had taken them far, far from this canyon where the village waited. After riding south for many days, the gray-eyed war chief and his hunters found themselves at the southernmost extent of the Llano Estacado. Without sign of buffalo or promise of other game.

“It is as if Winter Man has wiped all before him with his great cleansing, cold breath,” Tall One said quietly to his brother.

“Have the white men killed them all?” asked Antelope with a hiss of hatred in his question.

As those first cold days of searching stretched into many, the hunters had finally come across a few old bulls partially buried in a coulee here, then some more frozen in a snowdrift against a ridge—no longer strong enough to march on with the rest of the herd.

“These are what the Great Mystery offers us, to keep our families from starving,” their war chief explained. “These few left to rot by the passing of Winter Man’s storm.”

Antelope snarled, “We get these poor animals, while the white hide hunters leave the carcasses of the rest to rot in the sun!”

With nothing more to hope for, having reached the southern frontier of their hunting grounds, the Kwahadi warriors turned their noses north, limping back to their winter village.

“Where have the rest of the herds gone?” asked some.

“Farther and farther south still,” answered the few.

“To the land of the summer winds?” worried a growing number.

If the buffalo had indeed fled as far to the south as the tribe was beginning to fear, the herds would likely not return until the shortgrass time came to the prairies—not until that shift in the great season of things, when the winds blew soft and the Great Mystery once again compelled the great buffalo herds to nose around to the north in their annual migrations.

The terrible, cold breath of Winter Man whipped hot tears at his eyes as he remembered, and heard the low keening, the cries from the lodges huddled in this canyon, sheltered from the strongest of the winds.

In the waning days of winter the rains came to soften the hard breast of the land. Spring arrived, with little letup in the rain. It was a time of cold, gray, never-ending days. The ground sucked at a pony’s hooves. Yanked at a man’s moccasins. And still the little ones, the sick and dying, whimpered in their lodges.

The buffalo had yet to return. And the old men prayed over their drums and rattles and notched sticks.

And when despair seemed the darkest, news of a new shaman arrived from another band, a shaman who was said to perform wonderful miracles. He had promised to make war on the white man: those the Comanche did not kill would turn and flee from this land, their hearts gone to water, soiling their pants as they ran.

Tall One prayed this new medicine man would prove the answer to so many doubts.

His name was Isatai.

“The ass of a wolf?” Antelope asked, barely able to keep from laughing out loud. He had to keep a hand over his mouth.

“Some say his name means coyote droppings,” Tall One explained.

Born of a different band of Comanche, nearly the same age as their own gray-eyed war chief, this young shaman was already a rising star among his Penateka people. When two of his major predictions came to pass, news of Isatai spread like prairie fire across the southern plains. A year ago when a fiery comet had burned its first path across the springtime night sky for three days, the medicine man predicted the star would perform five more times, then return no more.

It amazed the Kwahadi to find no comet in the heavens on that sixth night. The fireball in the sky had obeyed Isatai.